Business with Bandwidth

Moving infrastructure from premises to the cloud can make sense for a lot of businesses. Few are going to look back on their lives, warmly recalling that time that they backed up their Exchange server or increased someone's mail quota. Microsoft and Google (among others) can both run your mail system for you for a reasonable monthly fee.

And Mail is just the start. While mail is perhaps the most natural cloud service (since it's been a cloud service before there was such a thing as "the cloud"), customer relationship management software (such as Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics), communication and collaboration (such as SharePoint and Lync), office productivity (such as Google Apps, Zoho, and Office 365), and even entire desktops are all available as cloud services.

To use any of these services you will need a connection to the Internet. The office Internet connection is always important, of course. Even in the pre-cloud days, it was annoying to not have access to e-mail or the Web. But with cloud services, the burdens placed on the Internet connection become a whole lot more serious. An overtaxed Net connection becomes a dire impediment to productivity.

While on-premises systems can benefit from nice fast LAN connectivity, with even 10gigE becoming a fixture in the server room and gigabit common elsewhere, cloud services generally have to make do with much scarcer bandwidth resources. For small and medium businesses, Internet bandwidth tends to be measured in the megabits, typically dozens, but sometimes in the single digits—especially for branch offices, retail premises, and other small sites.

That's unfortunate, because a good case could be made that these are the sites that stand to gain most from cloud services, thanks to their lack of on-site IT staff. Even some of the less common services, such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), can make sense in such environments: VDI means that the equipment on premises doesn't need to store any data and so isn't at such risk of theft.

Varying needs

Bandwidth requirements will of course depend on the service being used. Common services like e-mail tend to be fairly easy on the bandwidth. Some less common services, such as cloud-hosted virtualized desktops, by contrast, can place heavy per-user demands on an Internet connection, especially in deployments with high resolution desktops or multimedia.

Some tasks can be highly variable. Cloud storage services—whether straightforward file sharing such as Box and Dropbox or more complex document management like SharePoint—can end up using a little bit of bandwidth or a lot. Word documents and Excel spreadsheets are generally relatively tiny; photographs and videos can be huge. The occasional upload of a big file to cloud storage can be enough to clog up the Internet tubes, which on shared connections is a problem for everybody.

On top of bandwidth, there are also important latency considerations. Some applications, such as e-mail, are pretty latency insensitive. That's not to say that lower latency isn't better—it makes everything a little snappier—but desktop mail clients, and most Web-based applications, tend to be designed to be tolerant to a certain amount of latency.

Other applications aren't so robust. Latency is absolutely killer for voice over IP. Short delays of a few tens of milliseconds are enough to make calls sound strange. Hundreds of milliseconds can render them almost unlistenable, with 150 milliseconds generally regarded as the limit for tolerable voice calls.

VDI is similarly sensitive: snappy desktop experiences demand low latency connections to service providers. In many ways, the issues with VDI can be the most acute. Web apps don't generally place demands on the network once a page is loaded, so a lot of the time latency is masked. You don't notice the slow network when you're not actually using it. They also have clear, well-defined points at which you have to wait—the submission of a form or clicking of a link. VDI, however, places nearly constant demands on the network, and it can make you wait anywhere within an app. On slow links, even navigating with the mouse, clicking buttons and typing can be disrupted.

Moreover, if a single local or Web-based application is a bit slow, users can often switch to some other task temporarily. If all their software is delivered through VDI, however, there's no such escape route. A choppy virtual desktop will make every application they use unusable.

And of course, these issues can be intertwined: as we saw in the examination of latency, the large buffers on modern routers mean that bandwidth shortages (or rather, mismatches between local bandwidth and upstream Internet bandwidth) can in turn cause massive latency of many seconds. When latency is this high, even latency-tolerant applications can become thoroughly unpleasant to use.

Figuring out just how much bandwidth you need—or conversely, which services you can practically use given the bandwidth you already have—can be non-trivial.

39 Reader Comments

It won't be for some years yet but then this cloud BS will eventually die. Putting a 3rd party in charge of your data is insane, and it is an invitation for all kinds of security breaches that you aren't even going to be aware of until it is too late. But go ahead and get rid of that nasty IT department that is always getting in the way with their oppressive rules.

Cloud = new outsourcing. Seems like a great idea indeed. At first. My institution went through that and it was IBM they outsourced to. Now they desperately getting their services back onsite or at least trying to own their own hardware located in data center that accessible to them.

the main issue is upload, this does not need to be always high but you have often peaks when you want to move data a bit faster than a snail.

I'm looking into an off site backup for a small charity, the best they can get at their office here is 1mbps (yep BIT) upload, try to move a few TB of data to a "cloud backup" trough that...

a friend is a photographer (they have 2 offices), they are still jongling disks around just for the same reason, it's faster to copy it to a disk, take the car en go to other office than try to pump it trough pipe.

Upload is definitely the bigger challenge as guntherv notes. The US, in particular, has no real concept of symmetric connections, outside of a few small FTTH deployments. It severely limits even home setups. I'd like to, for instance, backup my server to Amazon Glacier, which would cost just $4/month, but we'd be looking at multi-week full usage of the upload link to get it done.

We have a very fat pipe both ways. Our issues were basically slow response to issues, lack of reliability and lack accountability for problems. Local IT, no matter how bad, cares more about your data than the Cloud company who hosts hundreds of institutions and isn't really invested in the data they host.

he US, in particular, has no real concept of symmetric connections, outside of a few small FTTH deployments

This is quite naive from an enterprise perspective. The US has *massive* amounts of symmetric connections deployed...just not to individual consumers who, in aggregate, don't need it. If a consumer wants it, they can order metroE or other available package. The problem is, most people who want it, want it at traditional consumer pricing, which is not scalable.

As to the 150ms VoIP rule of thumb, it should be noted that this is *one way* latency, not RTT.

As to latency, QoS, buffering, and other issues with traditional internet connections...it should also be noted that many enterprises that are going to "cloud" services are doing so via cross-connects at colos/exchanges. That is, we're not relying on the wild and wooly internet at large to connect us to these providers...we're doing more extranet style connections. This gives us full control of the link (or as close to it as possible) and the ability to monitor latency and bandwidth consumption in real time.

In short, we're pushing our corporate edge *out* to the cloud as well.

I work at a small company that uses QuickBooks Enterprise. QB is basically a dog's breakfast when it comes to networking, so the only realistic solution is remote access. For this reason I seriously considered hosting the server in the cloud.

However, I could never make the numbers work out. Rental fees for anything remotely useable ran into the hundreds a month, and I would still have to provide access for local use in the office that matched the bandwidth needs of the systems. In our case, the warehouse/office was located in what amounted to an internet blackhole and 6M/500kbps was the best I could arrange.

So I bought a AC-100 with SBS, installed everything on that, and it paid for itself in three months. Carbonite and a local mirror provide backup. I'd say this solution remains significantly less expensive for the vast majority of small and mid-sized businesses, where services can be co-located onto a single machine.

I've long wondered if there are hardware appliances that can be installed locally to cache cloud applications.

The example I'll use is Google (mail & apps). If you have a small cache server on your LAN that syncs with the Google cloud, then local requests for frequently used files & mail only have to travel down the hall.

This would need to be relatively cheap to buy/install/maintain, but seems like it would overcome a lot of the latency issues.

And entire article about cloud migration and bandwidth management, and not a single mention of one of the great advantages moving to the cloud has here?

You don't have to have all your workers in an office. Every worker you let work remotely is now a reduction in your bandwidth needs when you move to the cloud, whereas they were added bandwidth load when all your services were in-house.

It's one of the best reasons to move your services remotely. You can reduce local bandwidth requirements and office requirements by allowing more and more people to work from places that aren't their desk. To me, that's the real benefit of moving thing to the cloud. Moving your data needs out without moving your people out in-part defeats the purpose.

Cloud = new outsourcing. Seems like a great idea indeed. At first. My institution went through that and it was IBM they outsourced to. Now they desperately getting their services back onsite or at least trying to own their own hardware located in data center that accessible to them.

It won't be for some years yet but then this cloud BS will eventually die. Putting a 3rd party in charge of your data is insane, and it is an invitation for all kinds of security breaches that you aren't even going to be aware of until it is too late. But go ahead and get rid of that nasty IT department that is always getting in the way with their oppressive rules.

This is a silly point of view. Why would you think that joe blow's furniture company can provide an IT infrastructure that compares with even the worst cloud provider. This allows a company to focus on its core instead of worrying about providing the auxiliary business services to itself. Doing in-house security is an invitation for security breaches, just ask Sony. Yes, you are trusting a cloud provider, but businesses have to trust other businesses all the time. The electric utility to keep power on, building owner to keep a roof over their head. Now, the cloud provider to email flowing. The reputation of cloud providers will be built on uptime, but universally they're already better than in house IT. Large enough, and technologically oriented companies may see savings from going in house, but they will not see better security.

I really don't trust our company's data on someone else's network. Heck, I don't trust it on OUR network, but at least we have some modicum of control over how it's being accessed and where it's going on our network. If there's a leak, we can find the cause and come up with a plan of action to prevent it from happening again. If I trust that to someone else's network (especially with the recent NSA revelations), I lose that control and that ability to respond. The only upside is that we can sue them, but that doesn't fix anything except the direct monetary loss.

Yes, I can see the benefits of cloud integration on some things, but when we've got sensitive financial data being moved around our network, I think it's best to keep it on our servers. The benefit isn't really all that great and the cost in risk is just too high.

This is quite naive from an enterprise perspective. The US has *massive* amounts of symmetric connections deployed...just not to individual consumers who, in aggregate, don't need it. If a consumer wants it, they can order metroE or other available package. The problem is, most people who want it, want it at traditional consumer pricing, which is not scalable.

MetroE costs only marginally more than other FTTH techs and FTTH costs the same as FTTN, like GPON, once you include maintenance and diagnosing problems. And nearly all FTTH GPON devices also support MetroE.

edit: I mean Residential Grade MetroE. Business grade still requires more expensive equipment.

You don't have to have all your workers in an office. Every worker you let work remotely is now a reduction in your bandwidth needs when you move to the cloud, whereas they were added bandwidth load when all your services were in-house.

It's one of the best reasons to move your services remotely. You can reduce local bandwidth requirements and office requirements by allowing more and more people to work from places that aren't their desk. To me, that's the real benefit of moving thing to the cloud. Moving your data needs out without moving your people out in-part defeats the purpose.

Well that assumes that your workers can actually do the work remote. There are so many offices were that is not an option (car dealer, bank, insurance agency, store, warehouse, ...)It also assumes that the consumer/home internet connection has such characteristics of high speed, low latency. And start managing/monitoring the connections of all your employees at their kitchen table, where the same connection is used by the teenagers in the house for video, gaming, file sharing, etc. - Solution dedicated connection with dedicated equipment pid for by the employer - there goes your cost savings.And as you have heard from other posters, "consumers" don't need low latency, high throughput symmetrical internet service. And if the business needs them they can order at inflated business prices!

You don't have to have all your workers in an office. Every worker you let work remotely is now a reduction in your bandwidth needs when you move to the cloud, whereas they were added bandwidth load when all your services were in-house.

It's one of the best reasons to move your services remotely. You can reduce local bandwidth requirements and office requirements by allowing more and more people to work from places that aren't their desk. To me, that's the real benefit of moving thing to the cloud. Moving your data needs out without moving your people out in-part defeats the purpose.

Well that assumes that your workers can actually do the work remote. There are so many offices were that is not an option (car dealer, bank, insurance agency, store, warehouse, ...)It also assumes that the consumer/home internet connection has such characteristics of high speed, low latency. And start managing/monitoring the connections of all your employees at their kitchen table, where the same connection is used by the teenagers in the house for video, gaming, file sharing, etc. - Solution dedicated connection with dedicated equipment pid for by the employer - there goes your cost savings.And as you have heard from other posters, "consumers" don't need low latency, high throughput symmetrical internet service. And if the business needs them they can order at inflated business prices!

I got low latency high throughput symmetrical residential. Latency to my ISP is measured in microseconds and I get full line-rate 24/7. Never once have I had an issue with my ISP being the bottleneck.

Sub 1ms jitter from Midwest to LA, which goes through Dallas TX.

My latency to almost anywhere in the USA is because of the speed of light. Queuing times from routing seems to be negligible.

Seeding 45mb/s on Bittorrent at 8pm while playing my favorite FPS game while getting sub 10ms pings from servers in another state.. Heck yeah.

This is quite naive from an enterprise perspective. The US has *massive* amounts of symmetric connections deployed...just not to individual consumers who, in aggregate, don't need it. If a consumer wants it, they can order metroE or other available package. The problem is, most people who want it, want it at traditional consumer pricing, which is not scalable.

This is quite naive from a business/economy/policy/country point of view. * Those individual consumers are the workers that could work from home if they had low latency/ high throughput Internet connections.* Those individual consumers could use cloud backup, photo printing, VOIP, video conferencing, video sharing, generate content, game their heads off, etc. if they had low latency / high throughput Internet connections.

Google understands this, why not the average consumer ISPs, who cripple their "plans" with asymmetry, buffer bloat, high latency, data caps, port blocks, no IPV6, over sold shared connections, bans on certain protocols, bundling of TV and phone, ...

I got low latency high throughput symmetrical residential. Latency to my ISP is measured in microseconds and I get full line-rate 24/7. Never once have I had an issue with my ISP being the bottleneck.

Sub 1ms jitter from Midwest to LA, which goes through Dallas TX.

My latency to almost anywhere in the USA is because of the speed of light. Queuing times from routing seems to be negligible.

Seeding 45mb/s on Bittorrent at 8pm while playing my favorite FPS game while getting sub 10ms pings from servers in another state.. Heck yeah.

Your ISP must suck.

Lucky you! The reality is that your Internet experience is the exception, not the norm.

I personally can't get this kind of connection neither at home (I just switched from one major ISP to the other major ISP that offers fiber/cable at my residence, and they suck equally), nor at my employer (software company with o.k. connection), nor at my server hosted in a major colo.

I got low latency high throughput symmetrical residential. Latency to my ISP is measured in microseconds and I get full line-rate 24/7. Never once have I had an issue with my ISP being the bottleneck.

Sub 1ms jitter from Midwest to LA, which goes through Dallas TX.

My latency to almost anywhere in the USA is because of the speed of light. Queuing times from routing seems to be negligible.

Seeding 45mb/s on Bittorrent at 8pm while playing my favorite FPS game while getting sub 10ms pings from servers in another state.. Heck yeah.

Your ISP must suck.

Lucky you! The reality is that your Internet experience is the exception, not the norm.

I personally can't get this kind of connection neither at home (I just switched from one major ISP to the other major ISP that offers fiber/cable at my residence, and they suck equally), nor at my employer (software company with o.k. connection), nor at my server hosted in a major colo.

The hardware my ISP uses does not seem to have issues with buffer bloat even though I am rate limited to much less than the 1gb link speed. But even when I peg my connection, my pings will spike up-to around 200ms, but then it quickly goes into packet-loss.

To compare to my previous Cable connection, if I saturated my connection, it would reach upwards of 2000ms pings before packet-loss.

My biggest issue with my connection is I just let BitTorrent seed 24/7, and some times my router can't handle it.

And to keep from getting on my ISP's bad-side, I did eventually start throttling P2P a lot during peak hours. All Legal stuff. I get my entertainment fix from Netflix and Steam. Who needs piracy?

edit: My ISPs low latency comes from a well designed network and they don't do peering. They handle all of their bandwidth via their trunk to a Tier 1. That means uncongested connections to all Internet Exchanges in the USA, even during peak hours. Only a few times have I even seen latency on the backbone and of those times, they all had packet-loss. All of those issues were fixed within an hour.

If I see latency, it's always on someone else's network, never the backbone(Tier 1).

This is quite naive from a business/economy/policy/country point of view. * Those individual consumers are the workers that could work from home if they had low latency/ high throughput Internet connections.

Most knowledge workers still don't need symmetric connections. Low latency can be worked around, and indeed Peter discuss many different types of tools that mitigate it in the article. Plus, my point is that the *vast* majority of home consumers fall into an asymmetric model...that is, they consume far more than they output.

Google understands this, why not the average consumer ISPs, who cripple their "plans" with asymmetry, buffer bloat, high latency, data caps, port blocks, no IPV6, over sold shared connections, bans on certain protocols, bundling of TV and phone, ...

What google does or does not do does not mean it scales to large consumer bases. Plus, conflating things like buffer bloat, high latency, data caps, port blocks, etc. doesn't have anything to do with my original assertion. Hell, Comcast is already doing IPv6 to much of their consumer base, it's the employers that don't support it. As for the rest of those topics, I fail to see any relevance to the discussion at all.

What google does or does not do does not mean it scales to large consumer bases. Plus, conflating things like buffer bloat, high latency, data caps, port blocks, etc. doesn't have anything to do with my original assertion. Hell, Comcast is already doing IPv6 to much of their consumer base, it's the employers that don't support it. As for the rest of those topics, I fail to see any relevance to the discussion at all.

The current state of technology is such that affordable non-congested at any point 100mb/100mb fiber networks can be created in any metro/suburb and pay itself off in under 5 years.

Mind you, a lot of this tech is fairly recent and many ISPs may have just finished an upgrade cycle, but for any ISP that is about to upgrade, there is no reason at all why their network has latency or jitter at any time of the day.

The current state of technology is such that affordable non-congested at any point 100mb/100mb fiber networks can be created in any metro/suburb and pay itself off in under 5 years.

This is disingenuous at best, and depends *entirely* on peering and transit arrangements. Using the term "fiber" is superfluous. Further, I'd like to see a citation on the 5 year payoff.

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Mind you, a lot of this tech is fairly recent and many ISPs may have just finished an upgrade cycle, but for any ISP that is about to upgrade, there is no reason at all why their network has latency or jitter at any time of the day.

The fact of the matter is most ISPs do a damned good job of delivering data services for the most part. Part of the reason for this is that they recognize that the majority of their customers exhibit asymmetric data usage patterns, which allows them to provision appropriately and at less cost than simply catering to the outliers that somehow believe they need symmetric services.

The current state of technology is such that affordable non-congested at any point 100mb/100mb fiber networks can be created in any metro/suburb and pay itself off in under 5 years.

This is disingenuous at best, and depends *entirely* on peering and transit arrangements. Using the term "fiber" is superfluous. Further, I'd like to see a citation on the 5 year payoff.

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Mind you, a lot of this tech is fairly recent and many ISPs may have just finished an upgrade cycle, but for any ISP that is about to upgrade, there is no reason at all why their network has latency or jitter at any time of the day.

The fact of the matter is most ISPs do a damned good job of delivering data services for the most part. Part of the reason for this is that they recognize that the majority of their customers exhibit asymmetric data usage patterns, which allows them to provision appropriately and at less cost than simply catering to the outliers that somehow believe they need symmetric services.

I recently read a case study of an ISP in Minnesota that explicitly stated that they got no Federal help, so they had to go with something cheap. And in doing research, they found that FTTH costs exactly the same as FTTN.

They are offering 30/50/100 tiers and said their network can handle 1gb speeds if needed. They said their estimated pay-off for the infrastructure is 3 years.

As for transit, I was talking to an ISP owner that had sub 50k users, and he said prices for high quality transit was less than $1/mbit and told me he would rather have users uploading than downloading because his upload bandwidth isn't even being touched and it doesn't cost him any more. He was also an all fiber network. He had one residential user that was pegging his 100mb upload. He said he it didn't matter that it was peak hours because it didn't affect his costs and didn't affect any users, so why care?

As for transit, I was talking to an ISP owner that had sub 50k users, and he said prices for high quality transit was less than $1/mbit and told me he would rather have users uploading than downloading because his upload bandwidth isn't even being touched and it doesn't cost him any more

Which precisely illustrates my point that most users don't need or use links symmetrically.

My ISP doesn't peer because it's not worth the headache. All backbone transit, let the backbone handle peering. The Backbone has strict peering rules. If the 95th percentile of a port reaches 50% usage, the port must be upgraded, otherwise they will be de-peered. As for their customers, they sell bandwidth cheap enough that any moderately successful business can afford to keep their trunk from being congested because bandwidth is so cheap.

Bandwidth is actually so cheap, that the port and fiber cost is nearly all of the cost of the connection.

Failure does happen, that's why most businesses have multiple paths. As for the Internet backbone, most of the links have two physical paths to the same destination, and if both of those some how go down, most routes have 2-3 alternative optical paths via optical mesh networking. And if all of those go down, the world is about to end.

But go ahead and get rid of that nasty IT department that is always getting in the way with their oppressive rules.

I say get rid of the IT dept because you're tired of paying salaries to be in the IT business when your core company isn't in the IT business. I've also seen more data lost in private centers due to arrogant systems admins bought lunch by SAN vendors spouting lunatic fault tolerance scenarios than web hosts. I recently saw an IT director for a major health firm hold several meeting simply to discuss the length of power cables in his data center so his racks looked 'spiffy'. IMHO, there's a $100k in salary and benefits that can go to a faster cloud pipe - but that's just my opinion. The scary thing is I can list half a dozen first hand examples of scenarios like this.

I've watched school districts dump close to seven digits in wasted IT projects while laying teachers off.

IT's depts aren't being dragged into the cloud. They are pushing the board of directors towards it screaming to get their core business function back. They want to run apps - not pay layers of support costs to run those apps.

T1s need to die. There are too many office stuck on little CLECs with measly T1s at $700 a month on 3-year or 5-year contracts. It should be a crime.

Peter's analysis is thorough, but there's a much simpler calculation: ditch the ridiculous T1 as soon as humanly possible. Go with your favorite loathsome ISP for 25 times the speed at 1/8th the price and get on with life.

But go ahead and get rid of that nasty IT department that is always getting in the way with their oppressive rules.

Gladly.

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It won't be for some years yet but then this cloud BS will eventually die. Putting a 3rd party in charge of your data is insane, and it is an invitation for all kinds of security breaches that you aren't even going to be aware of until it is too late.

Sweeping declarations like this are not consistent with effective management. The better craftsman uses the right tool for the job.

T1s need to die. There are too many office stuck on little CLECs with measly T1s at $700 a month on 3-year or 5-year contracts. It should be a crime.

Peter's analysis is thorough, but there's a much simpler calculation: ditch the ridiculous T1 as soon as humanly possible. Go with your favorite loathsome ISP for 25 times the speed at 1/8th the price and get on with life.

Level 3 lists T1s for $300 and 1gb Ethernet for $6,000. That's 97% cheaper per mbit, but if you can't afford or wouldn't be useful, then you're SOL.. I've seen some places list 1gb for around $5k and 10gb for around $10k. It just keeps getting cheaper as you go up.

The current state of technology is such that affordable non-congested at any point 100mb/100mb fiber networks can be created in any metro/suburb and pay itself off in under 5 years.

Mind you, a lot of this tech is fairly recent and many ISPs may have just finished an upgrade cycle, but for any ISP that is about to upgrade, there is no reason at all why their network has latency or jitter at any time of the day.

I don't see how any ROI claim can be valid without more context. What works for, say, an enormous healthcare industry organization will not be at all viable for, say, a rural school district.

I gather it's endemic among technology professionals that somehow everyone's situation is always the same as everyone else's. The fact is, that's not remotely the case.

T1s need to die. There are too many office stuck on little CLECs with measly T1s at $700 a month on 3-year or 5-year contracts. It should be a crime.

Peter's analysis is thorough, but there's a much simpler calculation: ditch the ridiculous T1 as soon as humanly possible. Go with your favorite loathsome ISP for 25 times the speed at 1/8th the price and get on with life.

Level 3 lists T1s for $300 and 1gb Ethernet for $6,000. That's 97% cheaper per mbit, but if you can't afford or wouldn't be useful, then you're SOL.. I've seen some places list 1gb for around $5k and 10gb for around $10k. It just keeps getting cheaper as you go up.

Hooray. Now, then. How does an organization with monthly revenues less than $6000 cover the cost of gigabit Ethernet? (Edit: Sniped by your edit, it seems)

The point is not how much cheaper something is at scale, the point is how much can an office get for what they can afford. Paying $300 for a T1 makes no sense for an office that can do much more with Comcast Business class for less than half that.

You don't have to have all your workers in an office. Every worker you let work remotely is now a reduction in your bandwidth needs when you move to the cloud, whereas they were added bandwidth load when all your services were in-house.

It's one of the best reasons to move your services remotely. You can reduce local bandwidth requirements and office requirements by allowing more and more people to work from places that aren't their desk. To me, that's the real benefit of moving thing to the cloud. Moving your data needs out without moving your people out in-part defeats the purpose.

Well that assumes that your workers can actually do the work remote. There are so many offices were that is not an option (car dealer, bank, insurance agency, store, warehouse, ...)It also assumes that the consumer/home internet connection has such characteristics of high speed, low latency. And start managing/monitoring the connections of all your employees at their kitchen table, where the same connection is used by the teenagers in the house for video, gaming, file sharing, etc. - Solution dedicated connection with dedicated equipment pid for by the employer - there goes your cost savings.And as you have heard from other posters, "consumers" don't need low latency, high throughput symmetrical internet service. And if the business needs them they can order at inflated business prices!

Of course I'm assuming your workers can work remote. This is obviously not relevant for companies that can't (for whatever reason) have their workers be offsite. Hell, even then, you would be surprised what doesn't need to be on-site.

For example, at the car dealership, does the loan processor or the accountant need to be on-site? Nope, they could work remotely. Actually, the only people that really need to be at the dealership are the salespeople and the sales managers. And even then, you could have a subset of your salespeople that are the floor, and some that are appointment-only. The appointment-only people would likely work off-site as much as on.

If you presume that everyone can work off-site, and then start making exceptions for those that definitely can't, you will find a lot more can that one would traditionally expect.

The current state of technology is such that affordable non-congested at any point 100mb/100mb fiber networks can be created in any metro/suburb and pay itself off in under 5 years.

Mind you, a lot of this tech is fairly recent and many ISPs may have just finished an upgrade cycle, but for any ISP that is about to upgrade, there is no reason at all why their network has latency or jitter at any time of the day.

I don't see how any ROI claim can be valid without more context. What works for, say, an enormous healthcare industry organization will not be at all viable for, say, a rural school district.

I gather it's endemic among technology professionals that somehow everyone's situation is always the same as everyone else's. The fact is, that's not remotely the case.

It's a small town in the middle of no-where. It's getting no government support and is privately owned.

They have below average funding and above average costs, and they can afford faster cheaper internet. They have a lot of users, but most are spread all over the country side, and should have recouped the costs within 3 years.

There's your context.

Assuming you have the capital, which many smaller ISPs do not, making a high speed low latency network is easy and will pay itself off in short time.

he US, in particular, has no real concept of symmetric connections, outside of a few small FTTH deployments

This is quite naive from an enterprise perspective. The US has *massive* amounts of symmetric connections deployed...just not to individual consumers who, in aggregate, don't need it. If a consumer wants it, they can order metroE or other available package. The problem is, most people who want it, want it at traditional consumer pricing, which is not scalable.

That's great for the enterprise, but take a metro area like NYC. There are so many small/medium businesses that are basically being shoved at either TWC "business" service (still wildly asymmetric, and it is TWC still) or if they're lucky, they might have business FiOS available.

But a place with a dozen or so employees? They're priced well out of what a metro-e provider is going to offer. It's really a huge market, and at least here, TWC is eating it up and those customers are stuck with upload speeds that preclude things like offsite backups. It's a bummer. But too many people have already dug up the streets, and the big fiber guys have zero interest in small businesses who are going to want help configuring email and such - better margins on the traders where they can grab another few $K/month for slashing a few microseconds off a "premium low-latency" path.

I think cloud can be useful for a company just starting up. However, once a company can afford an IT team, I think they really should invest in them.

Unfortunately, most firms think of IT as purely a cost center. In reality, a good IT team, which works with your employees, can be an immense productivity booster. They need to be motivated to always be aware of the kind of work the organization is performing and as a result can suggest better tools that could help with the work being done.

I think some stuff is better suited to the cloud (email is a good example, and even that is largely because there are so many options which automatically download your emails and make them accessible locally). Collaboration tools are also good on the cloud. However, beyond that it gets more murky, and businesses should be making decisions based on their own use cases, the kind of networking infrastructure which is available to them, as well as on privacy and security concerns.

I managed the IT Operations team for medium sized company a few years ago and I have to say that none of the concerns you have listed as being reasons to switch to the cloud ever really bothered me. Just in the first paragraph of the article

Quote:

Few are going to look back on their lives, warmly recalling that time that they backed up their Exchange server or increased someone's mail quota.

Come on this is bread and butter stuff. If you can't handle something like this then you really should not be in the IT infrastructure industry. It is your freaking job to know how to do these things, efficiently and competently.

Either you know what you are doing or you don't. In the later case, just shifting to a cloud is delusional. The problem lies in lack of skill and knowledge.

But go ahead and get rid of that nasty IT department that is always getting in the way with their oppressive rules.

I say get rid of the IT dept because you're tired of paying salaries to be in the IT business when your core company isn't in the IT business. I've also seen more data lost in private centers due to arrogant systems admins bought lunch by SAN vendors spouting lunatic fault tolerance scenarios than web hosts. I recently saw an IT director for a major health firm hold several meeting simply to discuss the length of power cables in his data center so his racks looked 'spiffy'. IMHO, there's a $100k in salary and benefits that can go to a faster cloud pipe - but that's just my opinion. The scary thing is I can list half a dozen first hand examples of scenarios like this.

I've watched school districts dump close to seven digits in wasted IT projects while laying teachers off.

IT's depts aren't being dragged into the cloud. They are pushing the board of directors towards it screaming to get their core business function back. They want to run apps - not pay layers of support costs to run those apps.

As you said, those are first hand experiences.

I've had 10 people from middle management have an entire day of meetings to determine the font and text of our apprentices' namepin. I don't assume that all managers around the world are like this.

There are stupid people in IT just as there are everywhere else. Sometimes I'm one of them.

I think cloud can be useful for a company just starting up. However, once a company can afford an IT team, I think they really should invest in them.

Unfortunately, most firms think of IT as purely a cost center. In reality, a good IT team, which works with your employees, can be an immense productivity booster. They need to be motivated to always be aware of the kind of work the organization is performing and as a result can suggest better tools that could help with the work being done.

I think some stuff is better suited to the cloud (email is a good example, and even that is largely because there are so many options which automatically download your emails and make them accessible locally). Collaboration tools are also good on the cloud. However, beyond that it gets more murky, and businesses should be making decisions based on their own use cases, the kind of networking infrastructure which is available to them, as well as on privacy and security concerns.

There is no 1 size fits all answer, unfortunately.

^^ This so much.

The "cloud" is mostly for when investing into infrastructure is not worth it, say a web-site that only gets slashdotted once in a while. You don't want your servers sitting idle for months, waiting for the next big burst.

Or for a small company that isn't quite large enough to afford dedicated IT. Going from one IT person to two, is much harder on the wallet than from 60 to 61. The last thing you need is a full-time employee that has nothing to do, but you can't have your current employee over-worked.

I think the most important thing about the cloud is you aren't suppose to think like and accountant but an actuary... otherwise the pricing might seem a bit whack depending on your point of reference. Something that seems expensive now, won't be so in 5 years. Eventually storage and bandwidth won't be a concern for even the most demanding apps. But I have to agree with the article, VDI should only be done in a local private cloud in most cases. But you could be in a situation where your local datacenter, has such high electricity bills, and bandwidth costs, that piping the photons from 1000+ miles away might just make the most economic sense.

At the company i work for, the former IT manager moved all of our servers to a datacenter, but only provided a 10 mbps connection. This is plenty for documents, internal websites, and email. Its not so great for uploading large engineering drawings to the file transfer appliance, downloading 3d CAD drawings, and network imaging. I've had nothing but complaints. I think the cloud could be useful in a DR scenario, so that my company does not have to commit to the infrastructure up front to have offsite backups. The real trick will be providing a fast enough connection to move full backups to the cloud.

IMO, the cloud thing is way over-hyped, yet a huge leap forward in some situations. I've said since the beginning that the truth is somewhere in the middle -- and offices running into bandwidth constraints as they "cloudify" just helps solidify my opinion.

Implemented properly, I think cloud services have a useful place in I.T. At my last job, I pushed for moving the company to cloud-based Exchange for messaging, vs. the alternative of replacing an aging rack server and buying licensing for a current version of MS Exchange (plus a newer Windows Server OS). When the costs were compared, the cloud hosted option was only slightly (less than $4,000) more expensive over a 4-5 year period than the costs to buy all new hardware/software + estimated time it would take for us to migrate and configure everything. The internet bandwidth was going to get used either way (email had to arrive or get sent out from our location regardless of who hosted the server), so there wasn't any real impact of moving that off-site. And the big benefit was no more responsibility for babysitting Exchange -- including using up a good chunk of storage space to keep backups of the system and mailboxes.

And where I work now, we have a highly mobile workforce, including a large number of freelancers paid to assist with various projects. Especially when you have a team of employees working with a team of freelancers who might be located all over the globe, consistency is a challenge. You can issue laptops with specific software to your own employees, but you can't necessarily control what the freelance people use. If everyone uses a cloud hosted service, at least they're all on the same page, software-wise, while still free to use whatever hardware and locally installed applications they wish for everything else they do.

On the other hand, sure -- bandwidth is the elephant in the room it seems many people don't consider (until it's too late and things stop working well in the office). We encountered that when we moved to VoIP phones. Supposedly, we had plenty of bandwidth for them to work without problems, but in reality - latency issues reared their ugly head and caused many calls not to go through. (Basically, we were using a broadband cable modem and the provider could happily give us as much as 100mbits of download speed and 20mbits up, but just couldn't give us a pathway between our IP address and the remote VoIP gateway that had low enough latency. Once a call was established, it sounded great. But that initial lag with the first packets trying to establish the call were causing problems where you'd just get a fast busy signal trying to complete the call, one out of every 4 or 5 times.) The solution ended up costing considerably more money per month for a dedicated circuit over fiber with a different ISP. Works great now, but really ate into the claimed cost savings of using VoIP vs. a traditional PBX over a dedicated T1 circuit.